A tour of the ScholarThread web workspace

Every research tool has to answer the same layout question: where does everything live, and how much of the screen does each thing get? Most either cram the whole app onto one scrolling page, or throw up a handful of fixed sidebars that all fight for space. ScholarThread splits the screen into three panes that each do exactly one job — and that you can resize, collapse, or reorganize however the day's work calls for.

Three panes, three jobs

Open Library or Notes and you'll see the same shape, just filled with different things:

• Sources, on the left — the tree of what you're browsing. In Library, that's your collections. In Notes, it's your folders, Unfiled, Templates, and Trash.
• The list, in the middle — the papers or notes that match whatever's selected in Sources. Click a collection, see its papers; click a folder, see its notes.
• The workspace, on the right — a tabbed panel where the things you actually open live: a paper's detail view, a note editor, a PDF or EPUB reader.

Clicking something in the list doesn't navigate you away from it — it opens a tab in the workspace, next to whatever else you already had open. Read a paper, open a note that cites it, flip back to the paper — all as tabs in one panel, so you never lose the list you were browsing to get there.

The workspace is the main event, not an afterthought

The workspace panel is where the actual reading and writing happens, so it shouldn't be squeezed into a strip down the side. Drag the divider on its left edge and it resizes — and it can now grow to become the largest pane on screen, not just a fixed sliver. If you're deep in a paper with three tabs open, let the workspace take most of the window; when you're organizing your library instead, drag it back down and give Sources and the list the room.

Sources and the list can each collapse to a thin bar with one click when you don't need them, and every width you set is remembered — the layout you land on is the one you left.

Selecting more than one thing at a time

Click a paper or a note to select and open it, same as always. But if you're cleaning up a big batch — moving a dozen papers into a collection, or clearing out a pile of stray notes — you don't have to do it one at a time:

• Shift-click selects a range, from the last item you clicked to the one you just shift-clicked.
• Cmd/Ctrl-click toggles individual rows in and out of the selection without opening them.
• Drag any row in the selection, and the whole selection moves together — onto a collection to file them all at once, or onto Trash to clear them out in one motion. Drag a row that isn't part of your current selection, and only that one row moves, so a stray drag never sweeps up items you didn't mean to touch.

For a handful of items this is barely different from doing it one at a time. For fifty, it's the difference between a five-second job and a five-minute one — and now you'll see a quick status message confirming what moved, so a big batch never looks like it silently did nothing.

Trash, all the way down

Individual papers and notes have always been able to go to Trash. Now the containers can too: drag a whole collection onto Trash, and every paper inside it — including any nested collections — moves to Trash together, with the (now empty) collection itself cleared out of your sidebar. Drag a folder in Notes onto Trash and you get the same choice you'd get from that folder's own menu: move its notes to Trash, or just unfile them and keep the folder's contents around. Either way, ScholarThread shows you exactly how much is about to move before anything happens, so clearing out an old project takes one drag instead of clicking into every paper and note it contains.

Finding things without leaving what you're doing

Search lives in its own pane, with the same two-scope model we've written about before: Local for everything already in your library, Online for discovering new work in the open literature. (See One search box for your library and the open web for the full story on why it's just those two.) Whichever scope you're in, the workspace panel stays exactly where it was — search is one more source feeding tabs into the same panel, not a separate mode that throws away your open work.

Doing this in ScholarThread

Open Library or Notes and the three panes are already there — resize the workspace by dragging its left edge, and collapse Sources or the list with the chevron in their header when you want more room. Shift-click or Cmd/Ctrl-click to select more than one paper or note, then drag the selection onto a collection, a folder, or Trash. And when a whole project is done, drag its collection or folder straight to Trash instead of clearing it out one item at a time.

None of this is a new mode to learn — it's the same click-and-drag you already know, just no longer limited to one thing at a time.